Editing Discursive psychology (section)

{{short description|Form of discourse analysis}}
{{other uses|Discursive (disambiguation)}}

'''Discursive psychology''' ('''DP''') is a form of [[discourse analysis]] that focuses on [[psychology|psychological]] themes in talk, text, and images.

As a counter to mainstream psychology's treatment of discourse as a "mirror" for people's expressions of thoughts, intentions, motives, etc., DP's founders made the case for picturing it instead as a "construction yard" wherein all such presumptively prior and independent notions of thought and so on were built from linguistic materials, topicalised and, in various less direct ways, handled and managed.<ref>{{cite book |last=Potter |first=J. |year=1996 |title=Representing Reality |place=London |publisher=Sage}}</ref> Here, the study of the psychological implies commitment not to the inner life of the mind, but rather, to the written and spoken practices within which people invoked, implicitly or explicitly, notions precisely like "the inner life of the mind".<ref>Edwards, D., Potter, J. (2005) Discursive psychology, mental states and descriptions, in L. te Molder, J. Potter (eds.) Conversation and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 241–259.</ref> Discursive psychology therefore starts with psychological phenomena as things that are constructed, attended to, and understood in interaction. An evaluation, say, may be constructed using particular [[phrases]] and [[idiom]]s, responded to by the recipient (as a compliment perhaps) and treated as the expression of a strong position. In discursive psychology, the focus is not on psychological matters somehow leaking out into interaction; rather, interaction is the primary site where psychological issues are live. It is philosophically opposed to more traditional [[Cognitivism (psychology)|cognitivist]] approaches to [[language]]. It uses studies of naturally occurring conversation to critique the way that topics have been conceptualised and treated in psychology.